Cydia App SwipeSelection Brings iPad Text Edit Concept to Life

The concept video demonstrating an innovative method for iPad cursor movement and text selection that we noted last week has become reality thanks to SwipeSelection, an app released this weekend for jailbroken iDevices. The app, authored by developer Kyle Howells, is available now for free from the Cydia app store.

SwipeSelection is actually a tweak in the iPad’s software that allows a user to move the text cursor by swiping their fingers over the virtual keyboard. One-finger swipes move the cursor at a normal pace, two fingers move the cursor quickly, and a tap of the shift button prior to swiping turns on text selection mode, highlighting the swiped text instead of just moving the cursor.

As you can see in the SwipeSelection demo video below, provided by iDownloadBlog, the net effect of the SwipeSelection tweak is a nearly identical replication of the original concept video.

While intended for iPad, SwipeSelection works on the iPhone as well, although the alternate placement of the shift key on the smaller device makes using the text selection swipe a bit difficult. Also of note, the tweak requires swiping over the virtual keyboard, so apps or situations in which the virtual keyboard is not present will render SwipeSelection inoperable.

To try out SwipeSelection on your jailbroken device, head to the Cydia store and find it in the BigBoss repository.

This is a tremendous improvement when editing; I’ve already installed it on my iPhone and I’m glad to report that holding shift with one finger while dragging with another works. I think it was responsible for some typos I made in a text message (it detected dragging instead of a keypress), but overall a very welcome enhancement.